You won’t believe your eyes!

Nine out of ten people won’t read past this sentence.

You can’t believe how this story turns out!

Who would have thought anything so strange, bright, bold, beautiful, and bouncy could happen here?

Only my real friends will read to the end, and copy and paste this, and dance naked in the rain while singing the theme to the Brady Bunch.

“Here’s the story…of a lovely lady…”

Try not to hate me.

*

CLICK BAIT!

I guess I am as guilty as anyone else. I click the title that leaves me hanging, that asks for, nay, demands attention. A dangling question mark with a spurious answer. Unless it has a mysterious sea creature or a poisonous arachnid that I absolutely must know about before going to bed. (‘Cause that’s not gonna cause nightmares at all!)

I swear, everyday someone is ruining a favorite treat with a gross video or unsubstantiated claim about the poisons in our everyday life. My mom sent me one about my favorite ‘Don’t Kill Anyone Today Beverage.”

I read the whole thing, but didn’t see any links to data or studies. But then, I was reading it on a microscopic phone screen while simultaneously trying to keep track of my boy child. Still, who has time to follow up on the facts? Not when there’s all this junk to sift through!

(Google this yourself. I’d break the internet trying this on my old laptop.)

I’d like to say that, knowing the dangers and misrepresentations, I won’t fall for these time wasters any more. But I really don’t have any answers. All I know is that putting the iPhone down for a weekend won’t kill you. Will it?

Hang on…Googles topic…Okay…finds story on the Daily Beast (which is no doubt a reputable news source with a name like that):

DISCLAIMER: if you plan to become a luddite and leave the internet behind, perhaps you should consult a doctor before taking any drastic measures…or take away a teenager’s XBox.

There should be an easy path back to a normal life. A life unplugged and free from anxiety-inducing ersatz drama. One where you don’t jump at every text DING like a Pavlovian pooch or fall for sleezy, but alluring, tabloid-esque, ALL CAP article headlines. There must be a way back to normal!

But that’s a story for another day. I’ve got the car packed to go camping and a teenager waiting for his car ride away from electronic distractions.

Hopefully we will both survive to meme another day.***

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:

*Okay, I really hate doing laundry and grocery shopping so it doesn’t take much to distract me from a task…oh look, a SQUIRREL!

**You know that an Underwater reality show is in the works somewhere. Hosts will be Ursula the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid and Charlie the Tuna from the Star Kist commercials.

***I’ve been meaning to write this one for a while. And to do a much better job of it than this. Sorry.

Warning: Graphic and disgusting subject matter. Not for the faint of heart. Reminiscent of my prior post on the topic: The Diarrhea Diaries. Which, as it turns out, was volume one of an unfortunate series.

*

Dear Diarrhea:

The US Food and Drug administration recommends two to four servings of fruit per day.

If you visited the CNN article I referenced, you get why I fear produce. If you didn’t trip the above link, the 20-point, bold font title of the article pretty much says it all:

“Multistate salmonella outbreak linked to pre-cut melon”

Now the fact that pre-cut watermelon has been spreading salmonella throughout the midwest wouldn’t ordinarily concern me except for two things:

I ate some pre-cut watermelon Sunday.

Monday began a marathon that makes the prospect of running 26 some miles actually pleasant by comparison. This is not that kind of marathon.*

I did not buy my melon at any of the stores referenced in the CNN piece on salmonella contaminated fruits. This does not stop me from putting a very strong set of coincidences together and coming up with a likely culprit to my week spent regretting everything I’ve ever eaten that I did not personally sterilize in a 1400 degree Fahrenheit kiln.

I spent the last (gets calculator, does math) 168 hours visiting the powder room. HOURLY. Sometimes more frequently. A brief itinerary of my adventures can be summed up this way:

Day 1: 6:00 a.m. – stomach lets out initial howls of protest. By 4:00 p.m., I am so sick, I’m curled up on the floor of my son’s therapy office wishing I didn’t have to drive us back home.

“Can’t we just live here?”

Day 2: After waking all night long to tango with the toilet, fever strikes and I shake my digital read-out thermometer convinced it has to be wrong.

Day 3: Have decided that having a will to live kind of sucks. Scrounge through medicine cabinets to find decade’s old Tylenol and take it, hoping it will kill me.

Day 4: Fever finally breaks and I would celebrate, but I’m getting low on toilet paper and there seems to be no end in sight.

Day 5: Am now reconsidering my agnostic stance and will willingly convert to whatever religion will cure me.**

Day 6: There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but I suspect they are the tiny sparks as each of my brain cells implode from dehydration. I gird my loins and guzzle Kefir straight from the carton.***

I wipe curdled cream from my lips and scream:

“Take that, you plague-ridden, bacteria bastards!”

Today is Day 7. It has been a week and, slowly, I am feeling somewhat human. Though, of course, the diarrhea hasn’t given up trying to kill me. I counter its vicious attacks with a chemical carpet bombing of Gatorade and Live-Culture acidophilus pills.

I’d really like this to be the worst thing that will ever happen to me, but I known I am just not that lucky.

As for whether this was a case of Salmonella or not, who knows? If it wasn’t, I sincerely pity the people who’ve had it worse.

If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the bathroom…freshening up.

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:

*Hint: it was not a Law & Order Marathon either.

**I’m looking at you, Vishnu, you beautiful blue man. Although, Shiva the Destroyer makes more sense in the circumstances.

***Kefir – the sound you involuntarily make after tasting fermented yogurt drink. Which tastes just as bad as it sounds.

Feature image stolen from UK Pinterest site. Please forgive me, I have no energy or desire to get my own watermelon and recreate your excellent work. Although, Gallagher’s work on expressing rage by smashing fruit with a giant mallet is starting to make a great deal more sense to me now.

Wanted: A naughty cup of tea with a bergamot bite.

Aching for that particular and distinct pleasure that only a true acolyte of the libatious arts can attain. But alas…

My cup is empty.

I am truly lost without my Earl Grey Crème.

————————

The week I learned that Teavana was going to close its doors, I went straight to the mall, plunked down a piece of plastic and ordered an obscene amount of tea–something near 7 pounds–because that was the minimum I could order to get 30% off the total price. I did not even look at the receipt when I signed it. No price was too high a cost to pay.*

You think 7 pounds doesn’t sound like a lot? Imagine the backpack sized tea parcels they gave me–I’m sure I looked like a tea mule smuggling fine grade, uncut pure leaf addiction–I’d show you…but I drank it all.

*I lied. I did look at the receipt. The total was shocking, and this was after the discount. And, though I did not faint, it was only because I was afraid I would drop my complimentary cup of tea in the process.

**I want a tea that will own me, make me say “Thank you! May I have another!”

***This post may be a sign that I need an intervention…or a really dominant cup of tea.

I was going to title this 2017 – A Year in the Crapper and include an appropriate photo, but my friends tell me I overshare.

So, here’s my modified letter to the world:

2017 KINDA SUCKED

Like burnt-pan-of-forgotten-soup-boiled-drySUCKED.

How bad a cook am I? I burned soup, people. That’s how bad!

It took a whole year of bad things happening for me to put my finger on exactly what was wrong…

2017 – LIKE TREE-EATS-ROOF KINDA SUCKS!

Yeah, yeah. Having a tree drop on your house in a sh*t storm was a pretty big effing clue. But you could just chalk that up to really bad luck and shrug it off. If it weren’t for all those bad juju kinda things that kept happening.

I TRIED 2017. I REALLY DID.

I tried traveling to exotic locations and exploring for fun and adventure. I generally learned there is a diminishing return on happiness. The farther away we got from home, the more likely we were going to need an E.R. trip or an intervention. We are now circling the drain of 2017 and sticking mostly to home as a result.

CAMP CADILLAC – For when you finally admit tent camping isn’t for you!

My son loves to go places and sleep outdoors.

Or so I thought.

Instead, what I found was photographic evidence that my son just likes a variety of places he can write calendars–or, if not writing them, he is contemplating it with a fistful of markers or crayons awaiting his next fix.

My son discovered a love of popcorn. That was a new obsession.

This really was his primary food source in 2017

Camping meant lots of time spent popping this way.

But despite the happiness campaign the people at Orville Redenbacher are pitching, popcorn can’t fix everything.

If you squint you can make out my son’s favorite pastime. Hunting for calendars a thousand years from now.

Not even calendars can do that.

It also took me nearly a year of misery to realize something…

Gun Lake Reprieve – Momentary Bliss

Despite the occasional flashes of joy and happiness I managed to capture…

Do you have any idea how hard it was to get him NOT to eat this cookie so I could take this fuzzy image? You can’t!

In most of the photos I took of my son…he was not smiling.

Seriously, he really did love this place. But his face doesn’t show it!

He was there. But he was an unwilling participant in:

Mommy’s Campaign for Happiness and Symptom Control.

Millenium Park only reached a tepid level of joy.

If 2017 were a fairytale–it was the Hans-Christian-Andersen-dark-with-a-side-of-maniacal-laughter kind. And it would have opened with this line…

THERE ONCE WAS A HAPPY BOY…whose mother tried to address his recurring rage-outs with a wave of pharmaceutical fixes.

This was his most common expression–a mixture of Why? and Please Stop!

We tried several different combinations of psychiatric panaceas. If a drug caused a side effect, we gave a pill to fix the side effect – or in theory, that’s what it was supposed to do. Instead, it produced yet more side effects that, surprise, surprise, we’d try to address with more medication.

It was the loopiest, saddest, roller coaster of a year you can imagine.

Part of me wanted to believe this was a transition year. That turning thirteen and becoming a dreaded teenager was the root of this particular evil. But after several incidents of biting in school this fall, I decided to stop the massively medicated merry-go-round–at least in part.

We backed off the majority of his drug trials. He is back on the two drugs that have the fewest complications and I just deal with side effects that only have him crawling up the walls and not sleeping instead of the combo-platter pharmacopeia backlash that produced jittery anxiety, biting, and head bashing, among other things.

I now take comfort in momentary joys–as rare as a solar eclipse and therefore exponentially more cherished in their singularity.

Does he understand the significance of the earth’s shadow blocking the sun? I do not know. But he enjoyed a day out and that was good enough for me.

But when added up in seconds, the joys of 2017 could not outweigh the sorrows.

In this year, I have watched my happy boy transform in a downward spiral of misery and depression, taking me with him.

THERE’S NO MAP TO A HAPPY PLACE FROM HERE!

Then I had to leave my job to take care of him. Because, once he outgrew his handlers, I was the only one who could get him off the bus.

I left a good place to work for a life of uncertainty and near-poverty that allows me to work from home in the hours that my son is in school.

The only upside to this stress? I have spent less time developing an ulcer over the toilet tank of a government where The Great Evil and his Cabal of Cackling Soulless Ones are stirring a sh*t stew for the masses to swallow.

So, 2017–that’s it! I am out of it: Out of work. Out of patience. And now, out of time.

I AM DONE, 2017.

SERIOUSLY.

I AM DONE WITH YOU.

I am coasting the rest of this year and hope that 2018 has some upside that I just can’t foresee or imagine. But I doubt it.*

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*In a traditional end-of-year review, I usually take a light-hearted look at the craziness of my life. 2017 hasn’t been so much crazy-fun as it has been crazy-needs-to-be-committed. I’m not going to pretend otherwise and that’s my gift to you. Some years, all you can give is the honest truth…even if it is wrapped in a craptastic bow.**

**Seriously, though, being sick with cough and congestion this past week may have affected this year’s letter. Perhaps after I finish coughing up a lung, I’ll find my happy place again?

It is done. My time is up and I’m moving on…but to what? That is the bajillion dollar question.

If you are like me, you crave continuity, reliability, and a steady, if somewhat monotonous, source of income. I like knowing there is going to be a paycheck at the end of two weeks.*

Those days are over.

This summer, before a tree derailed my free time, my only daycare option—aka Grandma—indicated she’d actually like to enjoy retirement before my son drove her to drink or broke her into kindling. (Or words to that effect.) The countdown ticking off the hours I could still work outside the home finally clanged its leaden clapper.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls…”

So, I did what any sane individual would do. I panicked.

I spent a few hours…well, days really…maybe weeks…okay, I spent a lot of time devolving into a gibbering hot mess of indecision and fatal thinking:

How will I make rent?

How will I feed the mammoth I gave birth to?

How will I give up diet cherry Coke?**

This is what I do before I am capable of rational thought and planning. I engage all my worst coping mechanisms: I late night binge-watch television; I avoid responsibility; and, above all, I deny that anything is wrong.

I apparently can’t skip this step, as much as I want to, or as healthy as making sane, grown-up decisions would be, I need to stew.

But the time has come to pull on my big girl britches.*** It is time to get serious.

But first…

It occurred to me that I could have a little fun before I left my job. What were they going to do? Fire me?

Monday…I declared it officialScarf Day.

Alternate Title: Bad Hair Day Monday

Tuesdaywas myFifties Throwback Tuesday

I’m a throw-back rebel–I didn’t put it on a Thursday.

Wednesdaywas a hastily pulled together PatrioticSend-Offbecause I couldn’t find the costume I wanted to wear.

This is my go-to Fourth of July outfit–which I misplaced this year. There is a sense of closure from this OCD moment.

Thursdaywas my pride and joy—I wore myHarry Potter-Themedcostume.

Bring on the sock fetishists!

Do you know who I am? Bonus points if you get the in-joke with the locket. Hint: my last name is a clue.

And finally,

Friday—words do not do this justice, I think…

I’m feeling a little blue today…

It isWith Sadnessthat I depart my place of work. May I be remembered kindly…if a bit weirdly…by those I leave behind. And hopefully the blue hair spray will eventually come out.

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*I’m funny that way.

**The original title of this blog was going to be “Support My Coke Habit–GoFundMe” but I decided this might not translate well if people didn’t read past the introduction.